2. Remember the goal.

 

All that’s at stake here is your children’s lives.

In the pain of conflict (and remember that if parents find their conflict distasteful, children find it absolutely intolerable), keep the goal in mind: to give helpless children a safe place to live their one and only childhood.

There is one and only one scorecard in parenting or co-parenting: the children.

“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.”

—Japanese proverb

“You must have long-term goals to keep you from being frustrated by short-term failures.”

—Robert Bales

“If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much.”

—Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis